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Kroger Confronts Obamacare by Reducing Employee Hours

When the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare in June, many businesses were left to face difficult decisions. Some small businesses determined that they would need to eliminate certain benefits or reduce full-time employees and add more part-time employees to save on expenses. In some cases, small business owners determined that they would not be able to expand their workforce at all.

However, large businesses are also feeling the pressure. Last month, Darden Restaurants, the world’s largest casual dining chain which runs Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants among others, announced that they would test limiting employee hours to avoid the costs of Obamacare. They said that this reduction in hours is "just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications healthcare reform will have on our business.” Now, Kroger grocery stores have announced that they will be doing the same.

Kroger is a large grocery store chain which employes nearly 350,000 people and had sales sales of $90 billion last year. Last week, employees found out that, starting in 2013, there will be some changes for employees. These scheduling changes will be made to account for increased costs due to Obamacare. Employees who are not already considered full time will have their hours limited whereas, now, they are allowed to work as many hours as needed in the store. For many employees, this means that they will need to find a second job or another job altogether. The Kroger employee who leaked the memo said that “Hard-working employees of Kroger and Darden are among the thousands of casualties of Obamacare. And these hourly workers are far from being members of the evil “1%”, and this is only the beginning. Vote accordingly in November. Repeal Obamacare.”

With Obamacare reducing employer freedom, they will have to make difficult decisions. With a decision between reducing employee hours or reducing the number of employees entirely, businesses are doing what they need to do to survive in this new econoomy. This is not a question of politics, it’s reality, the new reality unless Obamacare is overturned.

Krogers saying it's having to cut back its workers' hours because of Obamacare is almost literally a joke. They have a long history of hiring people at reduced hours, since long before Obama was president. The one where I worked in southwest Virginia in the late 90s wouldn't give you more than 15 hours a week unless you were in management or the deli. Some weeks you got all of six hours.

http://BoyCottBadEmployersNow.intuitwebsites.com/ The previous quote is ludicrous. The best way to change the tactics of an unscrupulous employer is to boycott their business. Darden Restaurants dropped 37% after announcing hours reduction. The practice has now stopped.

RAIN, MUD.FECES OR BLOOD? Unions improved the standard of living for millions of Americans. To have that effort sullied by ignorant town criers such as yourself, is unfathomable and cannot go unchallenged. If you fear unions and want workers to continue losing livable wages. To go without healthcare because greedy Corporations refuse to do the right and decent thing, then you are the one who is being a bad American. Fools run around screaming " the sky is falling". The rest of us ignore the likes of you and try to make this a better country...in spite of you.

ObamaCare was supposed to reduce the cost of insurance, hence the Affordable Care Act. But is this really what it did? States with less regulations before the law was enacted had more affordable health care costs. Take, for example, North Carolina and Nevada. They saw individual premiums for people in their twenties rise over 150 percent after the law was enacted.

Just one week after the President said ObamaCare is working better than he expected, the Kaiser Foundation published a study that shows a whopping 95 percent of people who received advanced subsidies last year may have been handed an amount for which they were not eligible. To put that in perspective, to every 100 individuals that ObamaCare sent advanced subsidies, only five received the correct amount.

Whew, it’s been a tough week. Looking back on the last five years and all the harm ObamaCare has done to this country is a real downer. In order to head into the weekend on a slightly lighter note, let’s conclude our series with a little frivolity, the five best quotes about ObamaCare.

And the week-long spotlight on ObamaCare’s fifth anniversary keeps rolling right along! Passing the ACA was no easy feat, and Democrats had to make all sorts of outlandish promises to voters and politicians alike in order to advance the president’s government takeover of health care.

One of the features of any big government program is the inevitable catering to special interests, and exemptions for well-connected parties. ObamaCare is more egregious in this regard than most laws. As the week-long mourning of ObamaCare’s five year anniversary continues, here are the five dimensions of ObamaCare’s cronyism in action.

Rarely has such a major piece of legislation as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) been passed in such an overwhelming partisan way. Without garnering a single Republican vote, ObamaCare was rammed down the throats of the American people, even though a majority opposed - and continue to oppose - the law.

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act - AKA ObamaCare - being signed into law. Since that fateful day, Americans have been faced with fewer health care choices, higher prices, and burdensome mandates that have made an already tangled health care bureaucracy exponentially worse.

On multiple occasions over the last few years, President Barack Obama has reminded voters that he won't appear on the ballot again. Indeed, our long national nightmare will come to an end in 674 days. Presidents, of course, tend to engage on policy and politics even after they leave the White House. There's no reason to believe Obama will be any different.

The average American commits three felony crimes a day, and, more often than not, doesn't even know they've run afoul of criminal statutes. In 2009, Harvey Silverglate published a book, Three Felonies A Day, that highlighted the absurdity of over-criminalization made possible by an endless string of federal laws.